fixed a couple long-standing bugs

December 21, 2001 12:19 AM

I finally fixed a couple long-standing bugs. One, when you used <blockquote> in a comment, the preview page would look screwy, but upon submission, it would appear fine. That is fixed. The second, as mentioned by nicwolff below, had to do with the preview not being an exact preview of the comment after submission. That has been fixed, and the special code clean up that is done on submission is done on preview.
posted by mathowie (staff) to Bugs at 12:19 AM (24 comments total)

I think maybe you broke something else. Just now I wrote a post and it looked fine on preview, but when I posted it, all the inter-paragraph 2-line breaks were converted into 4-line breaks.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 12:41 AM on December 21, 2001

Yeah the tags keep getting doubled to post each time you preview
posted by riffola at 1:17 AM on December 21, 2001

er the <br> tags keep getting doubled
posted by riffola at 1:18 AM on December 21, 2001

I think I've commented about this before and it's been dismissed, but perhaps I didn't explain it clearly enough... Wouldn't it make more sense to parse blank lines as delimitng paragraphs rather than inserting explicit breaks? This would avoid posts with jaggly ends (iirc Dave Winer was the last victim of this) and seems more "high-level" (I would guess that XML feeds and the like would prefer paragraphs to text with breaks, for example).
posted by andrew cooke at 1:36 AM on December 21, 2001

Same here. Negative space is taking over.

One newline \n
Two newlines (next line is blank) \n\n

Break<br>
Break newline <br>\n

And...

<p>Paragraph</p>

Last line.
posted by dlewis at 2:42 AM on December 21, 2001

^^ Well it seems ok in Metatalk. Is it the same code? One last point: HTML character entities get translated in the preview text box. So &gt; becomes > and you need to retype it to avoid submitting a buggy post. This might be an IE bug, though.
posted by dlewis at 2:47 AM on December 21, 2001

i am also seeing this, erm, undocumented feature, today.
posted by asok at 4:23 AM on December 21, 2001

Same here. Guess we'll have to remove the extra "br" tags before we commit, right?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:08 AM on December 21, 2001

TONS of <br> tags being inserted into paragraph breaks on preview. Yep, Miguel, we should be deleting 'em, but I suspect things are going to look a bit strange until Matt fixes it. (Still doing it as of about 20 seconds ago, BTW)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:37 AM on December 21, 2001

On the fun side, stavros, it certainly makes everyone seem unbearably patronizing and pretensious. All "you mark my words" and "I'm going to space this out so that the full import of my message will come across"... SDB, because he made a longish comment, was the worst victim so far.
posted by MiguelCardoso at 6:12 AM on December 21, 2001

SDB, because he made a longish comment, was the worst victim so far.

for real, yo. i was reading the blogback thread and i was all "WTF! why is everyone putting a million line breaks in and writing nine thousand paragraphs? don't i have enough to read??"*

*note: i realize NOW that there were, in fact, not nine thousand paragraphs. it just looked like it.


teaches me not to read MeTa first.
posted by sugarfish at 7:23 AM on December 21, 2001

Wouldn't it make more sense to parse blank lines as delimiting paragraphs rather than inserting explicit breaks?

Yes, it would.
posted by gleemax at 7:38 AM on December 21, 2001

Stand-up guy of the day, though, a real Tom Sawyer to Matt's Becky Thatcher, has got to be asok who, after contemplating his very generously laid-out remarks, bravely took it all on his own shoulders and added:
"sorry about all the page breaks, i am a bit spaced out!"
(posted by asok at 6:29 AM PST on December 21)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 7:50 AM on December 21, 2001

SDB, because he made a longish comment

Bwahahhahaha...

...breath...

ahahahhahahahaha!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:21 AM on December 21, 2001

I kid because I love.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:22 AM on December 21, 2001

I don't need the help of a computer bug to be pretentious.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 9:53 AM on December 21, 2001

Ok, it's fixed. Sorry about that. Check <foo>
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:03 AM on December 21, 2001

Where are character entities getting messed up?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 10:04 AM on December 21, 2001

Like if you write &lt;yo&gt; to make <yo>, it turns them into actual angle brackets on preview.
posted by transient at 11:13 AM on December 21, 2001

Matt: try writing some text into the comment box with a character entity in it. For example:

this is some text with an entity &gt;

Then press preview. The preview text returns with the translated entity (as it should do), but the comment box also has the translated entity:

this is some text with an entity >

You then have to change it back before you do a post. It's only a minor problem though and it may just be a browser bug (IE 6.0). The wierd thing is that the &lt; entity doesn't seem to do this, while &gt; and &amp; do. Good work on the preview code.
posted by dlewis at 11:14 AM on December 21, 2001

only on MetaTalk or in MetaFilter only? Or both?

I can't seem to replicate it. Tell me exactly where and what you wrote to get them to escape.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:17 PM on December 21, 2001

Ah, I found it in the code. I replaced &lt; and would ignore the &gt; tag, because you only have to escape one for it to properly work. They're both being escaped now.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:27 PM on December 21, 2001

Awww, Matt...just when we flamboyant, bandwidth-be-damned types were exulting in such a good excuse for grandiloquent, space-hogging manifestos... :)
posted by MiguelCardoso at 3:29 PM on December 21, 2001

Miguel next time you use a phrase like "grandiloquent, space-hogging manifestos" you lose your "blame my aggressive conversational approach on my inadequate English skills" card! :)
posted by Karl at 6:57 PM on December 21, 2001